THE TAXIDERMIST'S DAUGHTER.

THE TAXIDERMIST'S DAUGHTER by KATE MOSSE.

BACK COVER BLURB: The clock strikes twelve. Beneath the wind and the remorseless tolling of the bell, no one can hear the scream . . .

1912. A Sussex churchyard. Villagers gather on the night when the ghosts of those who will not survive the coming year are thought to walk. And in the shadows, a woman lies dead.

As the flood waters rise, Connie Gifford is marooned in a decaying house with her increasingly tormented father. He drinks to escape the past, but an accident has robbed her of her most significant childhood memories. Until the disturbance at the church awakens fragments of those vanished years . 

FIRST SENTENCE {Prologue: April 1912 ~ The Church of St Peter & St Mary, Fishbourne Marshes, Sussex, Wednesday 24th April}: Midnight.

MEMORABLE MOMENT {Page 263}: The boy froze. He spent most of his time outdoors, listening to the strange sounds of the marshes, the calls of the owl and the fox, the way in which ordinary noises distorted at dusk, at night, at dawn into mysterious and threatening things. But this was something different.

SOURCE: A book swap.

MY THOUGHTS: Atmospheric? 

Without a doubt and yet despite its misty marshes, abundant magpies, oh, and an asylum for the insane, largely lacking in what I considered the Gothic.

Overly gruesome?

Peppered throughout with the macabre, with sentences such as that below I personally found the novel overly gruesome at times.

'Now, to his horror, he realised it was not his injuries stopping his eyes from opening, but that his eyelids were sewn shut.' - Page 211.

Intricate?

Hmm! With elements of folklore and 'beast fable', themes of blackmail and murder, to say nothing of the terrible secret kept by the protagonist's father there was plenty here that should have grabbed my attention. But sadly, despite my expectations, like all of the other Kate Mosse novels I have read, The Taxidermist's Daughter with all of its various twists and turns however predictable also failed to come to fruition. 

The characters?

Connie aside, all rather hum-drum I'm afraid. Largely two dimensional, The jumping around between place and event doing little to commit any of them to memory.

Generally very well received, perhaps its just me but alas I feel that I'm missing something. That there is something about this book that I'm just not getting.

Read for the 'What's In A Name? 2016': A book with a profession in its title' category.